“... Where kings have first been girt with Stephen’s sword,
Have first worn Stephen’s crown.”
From the Magyar
The scenery of the Danube as we reach the Hungarian frontier has taken on a new beauty, for there is, as it were, a natural boundary to the ancient kingdom where a spur of the Little Carpathians comes down to the left bank of the river, while a lower range of hills on the right marks off the Vienna valley that we have left from the far larger one on which we soon enter. At the point where the castled foot of the Little Carpathians is washed by the mingling waters of the March (the Morava of old) and the Danube, we have, however, for a brief space, a return to something like the lofty and rocky scenery of which we have seen so much in the higher reaches of the great river. On the height above the point where the two rivers join are castle ruins scarcely distinguishable from the jagged spurs of the rock itself. These are the remains of an important fortress castle of old, which was blown up by the French in the year of the Battle of Wagram, the ancient castle of Dévény (Theben).[12]
Just beyond is the steamer landing place for the little town of the same name. It is a point well worth pausing at for the exploring of the extensive but greatly battered ruins, and for the walk inland among the hills, especially to the summit of the Thebener Kogel, from which a grand view of the course of the two rivers, and of the extensive Marchfeld is to be obtained, with on the right, near the right bank of the March, the Schlosshof, at one time the residence of Prince Eugène, one of the most celebrated generals of his age. The view from the ruins themselves, though less extensive, is even more delightful with its nearer prospect of the river, in which the castled cone of Hainburg forms an important feature. With Hainburg thus near, and Deutsch-Altenburg with its memories of imperial Rome, but a little beyond, with the great battleground of the Marchfeld stretching below us to the west, and Pozsony (Pressburg), few miles further down-stream Dévény (Theben) is a centre of manifold interests as it is certainly a point of great beauty. Then, too, it makes something of a sentimental appeal as being the gateway to the ancient kingdom of Hungary.
The name of Dévény has been fancifully derived from Devoyna or Dovina, “the name of a goddess who was worshipped with honours similar to those offered to the Roman Venus,” by some early race of Slavonic barbarians, and that race is supposed to have had a temple on this height. In the ninth century the Moravian empire is believed to have extended as far as this, and the founder of that empire to have had a castle here. These traditions of history, too, have their companion tradition of romance, for a tragic love story is associated with the ruins.
The story runs that in the once-upon-a-time, a lord of Dévény (Theben) had fallen in love with a beautiful Carinthian maiden named Bertha, and had won her, but one day when he was away hunting he was apprised that a warlike abbot was carrying the lady off to a convent. The lover pursued the party, recovered the fair Bertha, and bore her back to his castle. Arrangements for the nuptials in the chapel were promptly made, and the ceremony just completed when a clash of arms was heard, and the enraged abbot and the lady’s uncle broke into the place with so strongly armed a force that the lord’s retainers were overcome in the panic that ensued. The new-made husband and wife sought the shelter of the small Nuns’ Tower on a precipitous spur of rock over the swiftly flowing river. Thither the storming abbot and his followers pursued them, and the irate man was about to seize his prey when the lovers, clasped in each other’s arms, threw themselves into the river below—“and when he looked over the frightful precipice it was only to behold the flash and ripple of the wave as it received and closed over his victims—Albert of Theben and his devoted bride.”
Leaving the boldly perched ruins, surmounted now by a slender column, raised as a memorial of the millenary celebration of the foundation of the Hungarian kingdom, we pass between the rocky spur of the Little Carpathians, and the lesser hills of the right bank, and in about five or six miles come to where the country opens out into one of the wide Hungarian plains. On our right stands boldly on a hill, nearly three hundred feet above the river, the great quadrangular mass of the Castle of Pozsony (Pressburg), and at its foot the ancient city of the same name—one of the largest towns in Hungary. In itself, for its history and on account of the many delightful excursions that may be made from it, Pozsony (Pressburg), is one of the places at which those journeying by river from Vienna to Budapest, should certainly “stop-over,” to use the expressive Westernism.
Apart from the ruined castle—destroyed by fire in 1811, according to one story by Italian soldiers, tired of carrying wood and water up the hill!—which is chiefly impressive for its size and for its four-square mass only broken by square towers at each angle, the glimpse of the town which we get from the river is in no way specially attractive. There are some places that can best be seen as it were in a picturesque summary from a point of vantage, places that we remember as “views,” but the ancient capital of Hungary is not one of them. It is necessary to have wandered about its narrow and tortuous streets, to have gone into by-ways that are but flights of steps, affording peeps into quaint old houses on one side, and views over roofs on the other, to have visited some of the old buildings, to have become impressed with the grand panorama from the castle hill, to have wandered about the hilly suburbs, the gardens, orchards, and vineyards, and above all, perhaps, to have made one of the lively crowd on market day in the long and irregular Markt Platz—all this is necessary to awaken that pleasant feeling which makes us remember a place with a lively desire of going there again.
If Pozsony (Pressburg) has lost something of its dignity since Budapest became the capital of the kingdom, it has a splendid past—and that it is not content to dream about that past, but has taken on modern activity, is shown by the number of factories established in its neighbourhood. It is, however, justly proud of its history. Twice has it been the means of establishing the Habsburg dynasty on the Austrian throne, though, as Godkin puts it in his “History of Hungary,” “it was the eagle lending his plume to wing the arrow that was to drink his own life-blood.”